1940's Advertising-Bond Bread Traditional Cache

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Hidden : 6/20/2010
Difficulty:
1 out of 5
Terrain:
1.5 out of 5

Size: Size: small (small)

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Geocache Description:

Elevation 205.3 m.

A series dedicated to 1940's advertising. Each cache is a look back at how the media portraid common products, some good, some bad. All of the locations will have something in common.

I found old adds in my Grandfathers house and wanted to share them, so I have scanned the adds in and provided the history to go along with the add.

The General Baking company

Incorporated: 1911 as General Baking Co.
Employees: 7,216
Sales: $568.6 million





The history of General Host may be traced to 1911, when the General Baking Co. was incorporated in New York as an amalgamation of 19 former baking businesses covering many major cities between New Orleans and Boston. In 1924, William Ward formed the Continental baking Company of Maryland. The new company acquired General Baking Company and the name was changed to Ward Food Products Corporation but on April 3, 1926 Ward Food Products Corporation was dissolved by the Justice Department into three independent corporations; Continental Baking, General Baking and Ward Baking Co. By 1930 the company owned 50 plants serving cities in 18 states. The production of bread, sold under the trade name of "Bond Bread," accounted for over 90 percent of its sales and production averaged nearly 1.5 million loaves per day. Cakes and pies were also manufactured under trade names. Net 1930 earnings of $8.1 million fell to $2.8 million in the Depression year of 1933.

Major expansion at General Banking did not take place until 1956, when the company bought a controlling interest in Van de Kamp's Holland Dutch Bakers, Inc. of Los Angeles, thereby stretching its operations to the West Coast. Besides Van de Kamp's bakeries in Los Angeles and Seattle, this company had 240 supermarket service and retail store units, four coffee shops, and a drive-in restaurant in California, in addition to 54 self-service retail stores, four supermarket outlets, and ten bakery shops in Washington. The acquisition added $22 million in annual sales to General Baking's $128 million from 40 bakeries. At the end of 1957 the company expanded its network to the Rocky Mountain states by acquiring Eddy Bakeries, Inc., of Helena, Montana.

By the early 1960s General Baking was earning less than one percent profit on its sales and suffering from increased competition from supermarkets, many of which had begun equipping their stores with their own bakeries. General Baking lost money in 1961 and 1965, and control passed to a Canadian firm, Denison Mines, Ltd., before the 1963 annual meeting.

In 1965, Goldfield Corp., an investment oriented mining concern, acquired 41 percent of General Baking's stock, which it raised to a majority share by June of the following year. Its chairperson, Richard C. Pistell, became chairperson of General Baking. The flamboyant Pistell, a rough-and-tumble former merchant seaman, shook the tranquil enterprise to its foundations.

One of Pistell's first moves was to address General Baking's loss of nearly $2 million in the first half of 1965 by closing 15 collectively unprofitable plants and distribution centers. The Bond Baking Co. division, previously run from headquarters, was made a separate entity with its own president. Eddy Bakeries, formerly a wholly owned subsidiary, was merged into General Baking as a division. In October 1966 General Baking acquired from Goldfield all outstanding stock of Yellowstone Park Co., Everglades Park Co., and five parcels of land in Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico, together with related assets, for $6.4 million. These companies housed vacationers in motels and camps on park concessions. To better reflect the company's new activities, General Baking was renamed the General Host Corp. in 1967.

The late 1960s and early 1970s brought several challenges to General Host. First, in March 1968, a federal grand jury indicted seven baking concerns and eight of their officials on charges of illegally conspiring to fix bread prices in the Philadelphia area. Among these companies and officials were General Host, its president, and the regional manager of Bond Baking. As a result, General Host and the other bakeries agreed in 1971 to certify that each sealed bid for the sale of bakery products in the Philadelphia area had not involved collusive activity. In a similar case, four companies, including General Host, pleaded no contest in 1972 to a charge of fixing bread prices in the New York metropolitan region. Three of the four, including General Host, were fined $50,000 each.

General Host reported a $67.3 million loss for 1969, and by 1972 the company was disposing of virtually all of the Bond division.

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